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Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

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Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#151

Post by dpacmittal »

squarefoot wrote: post #45

Fake reviews also contribute to more fake and low quality products being sold. It looks like Amazon simply doesn't care. https://thehustle.co/amazon-fake-reviews FTA: "One stay-at-home mom from Kentucky told me she makes $200-300 per month leaving positive reviews for things like sleep masks, light bulbs, and AV cables." “Do you actually like the products?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she wrote. “I never use them.”

Amazon's strategy is to create mistrust for any other product other than its in house brands.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#152

Post by gpanders »

fma wrote: post #95
joshgachnang wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been about the same for me. I went from total Google fanboy to migrating a lot of my life away from them and advising others to do the same.

Thinking about doing the same to diversify where my private info gets sucked up. Who do you use for email?

If you have a domain name registered, sometimes your registrar will offer built in email. For example, I have a domain registered with Gandi and they provide a free email service.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#153

Post by joeblau »

A few weeks ago, I bought some shampoo and conditioner from Amazon. I wanted a bulk size and the bottle looked like it was form the official manufacturer. When I got the bottles, opened and used them, I could tell they were fake. The consistency of the product was terrible and the smell was overly harsh. I returned both of them and just ordered the products from the company website. Funnily enough, the company website didn't even have the sizes that were listed on Amazon. Over time, I've become more wary of buying household products Amazon's website.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#154

Post by ryandetzel »

Ive tried to buy direct from the manufacture four times in the last two months, every single time it was more expensive than buying from amazon and these are things that are not easily faked so I'm sure they legit. One of them I contacted the manufacture to see if they would at least match the $20 difference on amazon and they said just to order it from amazon. Wtf.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#156

Post by QuinnWilton »

int_19h wrote: post #143
iamaelephant wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the search results.

Google search results have been deteriorating in the past couple of years. It feels like the algorithm has been deliberately tweaked to produce larger quantities of less relevant results - it will often substitute words for "synonyms" that are much broader in scope, to the point of rendering the query pointless. I can't help but think that the purpose is to then show more "relevant" ads.

Even so, the deteriorated results I get from Google tend to be better than what I get anywhere else. I have DDG set as my default engine, and frequently need to fallback on Google.

I wish I could say DDG was as good or better, but outside of the privacy perspective, that unfortunately hasn't been my experience.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#157

Post by foxfired »

Time to pack the kids in the car and drive to your local hardware store.

No, seriously. Go to your local hardware store. If the quality of your purchase matters, then the surest way to get good quality product is to go to the store and pick it up yourself. If for some reasons you get a fake, you can drive back to the store and they'll be happy to replace it. You don't have to talk to a faceless corporation.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#158

Post by agumonkey »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #88

It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews. Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more…

The web feels like a huge fine grained stress test to reassess all the reasons why most of the world was the way it was.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#159

Post by lsc »

andrewfromx wrote: post #124
ThePhysicist wrote: post #88

It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews. Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more…

i think from the director of engineering at amazon charged with making sure reviews are not fake, they would say "we can only make it so difficult to create a new account and prove you are human before it literally becomes impossible for new people to make real accounts." You say amazon has to police this more. I say amazon has tried and there is so much money to be made in jumping through the hoops to prove you are…

eh, but if this problem gets bad enough, it will kill amazon. If I order a certain brand of stuff off of amazon and I get something I can't use often enough, I'm going to order from another store.

Right now, I'm paying a premium for the convenience of amazon. I'm willing to pay a reasonably large premium for convenience; taking that premium is a sustainable business, but if I'm paying a premium, I expect the product I ordered.

But you know what? safeway is just down the way, and they do deliveries, too. CVS does deliveries, and doesn't seem to have this issue.

I mean, sure, an everything store is great, but if you have enough quality issues, I'm going to go back to maintaining accounts at each vendor.

(all that said, the problem is below my threshold right now. I have been sent the wrong product, but... it doesn't happen often.)

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#160

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #88

It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews. Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more…

> I find that I buy more in smaller e-commerce shops, because I find they're much less affected by the review fraud

I've had to start doing this with violin strings. The sort of strings I like are pretty damn expensive (~$120 list price), so originally, any chance I could get to save say 10% I would take. But I heard way too much about fakes being shipped from Amazon 3rd party sellers, so I've started just buying everything from Shar (which, it turns out, provides steep discounts fairly regularly; you just have to wait for them).

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